The signs of burnout most people expect are collapse, tears, not being able to get out of bed. Those are the late signs. The early ones are quieter and much easier to explain away: you are efficient but joyless, you sleep but wake tired, you can do the work but not the small talk afterwards, and the thing you used to love about your job now produces a faint sense of dread on Sunday evening.
Burnout, in the plain definition, is exhaustion plus detachment plus a feeling that what you do no longer works. It is not a medical diagnosis in most countries; it is a state. And the early state looks less like breaking down than like running on a battery that never gets above forty percent.
Here are the signs I hear about most often from the people who come to me in Cannes — nearly all of them high-functioning, most of them convinced they were "just tired".
Efficiency with the lights off
You are still getting things done. Emails answered, deals closed, children collected. From the outside nothing has changed. From the inside, every task feels like lifting the same weight twice. This is the sign people miss longest, because the output is intact. Only the cost has changed.
Sleep that doesn't repair
You sleep six, seven, eight hours and wake up already behind. Or you fall asleep instantly and wake at 4 am with a mind that has been running while you slept. Burnout sleep is not insomnia exactly. It's sleep without the part where the body puts itself back together.
Irritation at small things, flatness at big things
A slow waiter irritates you more than it should. A good piece of news lands with nothing. Both come from the same place: the nervous system has been in alert for so long that it has stopped modulating. Everything is either a threat or nothing.
The body starts talking
Jaw tight in the morning. Shoulders up near the ears by lunchtime. A stomach that reacts to stress before your mind has registered it. Headaches at the end of the week. What I hear most often, in the first session, is a version of the same sentence: "I didn't know my shoulders were up until they came down." People have carried the hold for so long it has become their shape. The body reports burnout long before the person admits it.
"I just need a holiday"
You take one. You come back. Within four days it is exactly the same. This is the clearest sign of all, and the one people argue with hardest. If rest doesn't restore you, you are not tired. Something has stopped doing its job — usually the ability to switch off at all.
What helps when you can't stop
The honest answer is that burnout recovers when the nervous system learns it is allowed to stand down. A month in the mountains does that for some people. Most of the people I work with cannot take a month; they have a company, a family abroad, a household in a country that isn't theirs yet.
What I offer instead is a series of four sessions over three to five weeks — The Renewal. Each is 45 minutes, at your home or villa or at my space in Cannes. You lie down, fully clothed, and for the length of the session nothing is asked of you. That is not a metaphor. It is the whole point. Most people describe the first session as the first time in months their body was fully still. By the third or fourth, the stillness starts to be available outside the session too.
Reiki doesn't treat burnout — nothing external does. What it does is give the system a repeated, reliable experience of standing down, until it remembers how. If your burnout comes with symptoms a doctor should see — chest pain, persistent low mood, panic — see the doctor first. The sessions work alongside that, not instead of it.
FAQ
What are the first signs of burnout? Waking tired after enough sleep, losing pleasure in work you used to enjoy, irritation at small things and flatness at good news, and a holiday that doesn't restore you. Collapse comes much later, if at all.
Is burnout the same as depression? No, though they can overlap. Burnout is tied to a specific load and usually lifts when the load and the nervous system are addressed. If your low mood doesn't lift with rest, or you feel hopeless, speak to a doctor.
How does Reiki help with signs of burnout? By giving the nervous system a repeated experience of full rest, so it relearns how to switch off. It's complementary — it works alongside medical or psychological care, never instead.
If you recognised yourself
The Renewal is four sessions over three to five weeks, €640. Message me on WhatsApp and tell me, in one line, which of the signs above is yours. I'll tell you honestly whether four sessions is the right shape, or whether one is enough to start.